AppHarvest
Indoor farmingUSA
New to Unitard
💀 Dead / Bankrupt
Peak $1 BillionToday
~-100%
from peak
- 🦄Became a unicornJan 2021
- 📈Peak valuation$1 Billion ’21
- 💔Became a UnitardJul 2023
- 💸Last valuationWiped out
🔥 Raised & burned
$800M
Total raised
$396K/day
Burned · 5.5y alive
Funding: press/SEC/CNBC
Current status
Bankrupt 2023
The rise & fall
6 moments · 2018–2023The key moments, with employee sentiment along the way.
Jan 2018
Jan 2018
Founded in Morehead, Kentucky
Jonathan Webb pitches giant high-tech greenhouses as Appalachia's post-coal future.
CNBC
Jan 2021
Jan 2021
The peak: a $1B SPAC debut$1B
Goes public as the first tomatoes ship from its 60-acre Morehead greenhouse, with Martha Stewart on the board.
CNBC
2021
2021
The harvest disappoints
Operational problems and weak harvests force slashed guidance in year one as a public company; the stock craters.
Fortune
2022–23
2022–23
Burning $800M to grow tomatoes
Heavy cash burn on new greenhouses outruns what the produce brings in.
Canary Media
2021–23
From the inside · Glassdoor reviews, 2021–23
Glassdoor reviews described a two-tier company — salaried office staff and hourly greenhouse workers split on pay, benefits and stock — with recurring accounts of mandatory six-day weeks in greenhouses topping 100°F. Insiders doubted production could ever scale as claimed.
Jul 2023
Jul 2023
Chapter 11 — joins the Unitard Club 💔
Files for bankruptcy in July 2023 with essentially all value gone — about $800M raised, spent in five years.
Court filing
$1Bof peak value erased · 6 years
💬 entries paraphrase anonymous, unverified reviews posted publicly on Glassdoor ↗; dated facts carry their source.
How it happened
AppHarvest was a U.S. indoor/controlled-environment agriculture company that went public via SPAC in early 2021 at about a $1B valuation, touting large high-tech greenhouses. Operational problems, weak harvests, and heavy cash burn crushed its stock, and the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2023, losing essentially all value.
Source: Fortune/Canary Media
Where they went
- Jonathan Webbfounder & CEOCo-Founder & CEO at The Nuclear Company
Current roles as self-reported on LinkedIn, retrieved 2026-08-21. See our methodology.
